Mob or Crowd? 1789 and 2024

Angry, out-of-control mob or orderly, purposeful crowd? It’s an old question, asked in relation to countless events in modern times. The classic case for me involves the people who entered dramatically into the history books when they stormed the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789, capturing this fortress/prison and symbol of royal despotism, and marking the first popular triumph of the French Revolution. They poured into the streets on many other occasions over the next few years. Again and again, their actions put a violent end to political stalemates and sent the Revolution hurtling forward into uncharted territory. But how should we characterize them, and their actions? A venerable conservative strain of history-writing, exemplified by the French authors Hippolyte Taine and Pierre Gaxotte, characterized them as a disorderly, violence-addicted mob. So did Simon Schama in his best-selling 1989 Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. A great deal of popular fiction, especially in Britain (think A Tale of Two Cities or The Scarlet Pimpernel) went even further and cast them as evil, bloodthirst monsters. But a pro-revolutionary tradition, exemplified by historians such as Jules Michelet, saw them to the contrary as the representatives of a righteous people taking up arms against injustice. More recently, scholars from Albert Soboul (Les sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II, 1958) and George Rudé (The Crowd in the French Revolution, 1967) to Haim Burstin (Une révolution à l’oeuvre, 2005) and Micah Alpaugh (Non-Violence and the French Revolution, 2015) have emphasized their restraint and rationality and argued that they principally engaged in violence to achieve specific goals, or in response to provocations.

Needless to say, a great deal depends on what evidence is highlighted and how it is read. In early September, 1792, many veterans of earlier popular actions invaded Parisian prisons holding suspected counterrevolutionaries and killed at least 1200. The sober republican historian Pierre Caron (Les massacres de septembre, 1935), and the more excitable right-winger Frédéric Bluche (Septembre 1792: Logiques d’un massacre, 1986) read the same sources and came to dramatically different conclusions about how and why the perpetrators acted. In describing the event, textbooks sympathetic to the Revolution tend to emphasize the threat posed to Paris by the Prussian army, and the widespread assumption that the enemy had secret allies in the city. Hostile textbooks dwell on the many atrocities that took place, such as the supposed parading of the severed head of Marie-Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting, the Princesse de Lamballe, in front of the Queen’s window. Overall, in French Revolutionary history, team “crowd” is generally seen as having prevailed over team “mob.” I agree that its interpretation is more convincing. But it’s worth remembering that a majority of the specialists in the field start off broadly sympathetic to the Revolution and its ideal and tend more naturally towards the “crowd” position.

And the question “mob or crowd” is not a purely empirical one. If a group of people behaves with rationality and restraint on nineteen occasions and on the twentieth runs amok and kill several innocent bystanders, how should we characterize it? If hundreds of protestors loudly chanting slogans think of themselves as restrained, but the people they are protesting against feel frightened and intimidated, whose feelings should weigh more heavily in the overall interpretation? Finding additional sources cannot resolve these questions. In fact, the more sources we have, the more difficult the interpretation, because it becomes so easy to extract evidence to support many different points of view.

We should keep these problems of interpretation in mind before leaping to judgment about what is happening on American university campuses in the year 2024. If the amount of evidence on popular actions in the French Revolution is abundant, when it comes to the current events it is overwhelming. Every protest march, encampment, confrontation and police action is filmed by onlookers who then upload the recordings to social media, accompanied by their usually very partial commentary. And the recordings are often carefully edited. You see a clip of a protestor thrown to the ground by the police and zip-tied. Clear evidence of an overreaction! Police brutality! Or had the protestor, in the moments before the clip starts, been shouting obscenities at the police, pushed them, and ignored repeated requests to leave the area? Alternately, a protestor takes an Israeli flag and grinds it into the mud. Anti-Semitism! Or had a counter-protestor been jabbing him in the face with the flagpole thirty seconds earlier?

A case at my own university illustrates these difficulties of interpretation. On April 29, a group of students protesting Princeton’s ties to Israel briefly occupied Clio Hall, the home of the university’s Graduate School administration. Princeton’s Public Safety force, whose members are deputized by the local police, quickly announced that anyone who did not leave the building would face arrest. After an hour, officers moved in and arrested thirteen students. On these points, everyone agrees. But what actually happened inside the building? According to Rochelle Calhoun, the university’s Vice President for Campus Life, “as protestors entered Clio Hall, our staff found themselves surrounded, yelled at, threatened, and ultimately ordered out of the building.” She called the behavior “abusive.” But Ruha Benjamin, a Professor of African-American Studies, who accompanied the protestors as a “faculty observer,” insisted that they were “polite and soft-spoken,” and exhibited “cordial, quiet, and organized behavior.” Whom to believe? Calhoun obviously had an interest in justifying the use of police force. But Benjamin, who has participated in the protests herself and has frequently attacked the university for its ties to Israel, obviously had an interest in condemning that same use of force and in supporting the protestors. The incident—and the contending interpretations—have generated thousands of social media posts, many including video clips purporting to support one side or the other (mostly, the protestors). Based just on this evidence, I think it’s impossible to say which side is right. Furthermore, protestors who saw themselves as acting quietly and politely may well have been perceived very differently by university staff.

Perceptions in these cases depend enormously on the values, beliefs and information that people bring with them to the scene. For several days, a protest encampment sprang up directly under my office window at Princeton. From what I could see, it was entirely peaceful, and the worst the protestors did when a few onlookers started screaming at them was to scream back. Most of the posters they pinned to tree branches condemned Israel for the many civilians the IDF has killed in Gaza, as part of its attempt to root out Hamas from the territory. But some of the speakers praised Hamas and lamented the “34,000 martyrs” in Gaza—a figure that presumably includes the fighters killed during their murderous incursion into Israel on October 7. There was a Hezbollah flag in evidence as well. People who came to the encampment believing that October 7 was an act of desperation by a people oppressed beyond measure were mostly not bothered by this praise for the fighters. People who came to it believing that October 7 was a savage and inexcusable atrocity against innocent people frequently saw the praise as discrediting the entire enterprise. Social media posts of course reflected this division.

I imagine that some people reading this column will think that I have scandalously underestimated the violence and anti-Semitism of the campus protests. Others will think that I have scandalously underestimated the violence and brutality with which the protests have, in some places, been repressed. And some will think I am saying that the truth is impossible to discern. I’m certainly not saying the last of these. What I am saying is simply this: beware of simple, easy interpretations of what is going on, especially when most of what you are reading online is simply reinforcing the views you had to start with and providing you with more carefully curated, inflammatory, and highly partisan fodder for your outrage.